1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed herein generally relates to internet-based services, and it more particularly relates to providing internet-based services according to a potential geographic location of a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks serving billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of different networks of local and global scope (e.g., including private, public, academic, business, and government networks), which are linked by a broad array of electronic networking technologies including wired (e.g., copper cable, fiber optic, etc.) and wireless (e.g., radio-frequency, optical, etc.) technologies, using the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). Data transmitted (e.g., carried) over the Internet relates to a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents (e.g., web pages) of the World Wide Web (WWW). Services available on the Internet (or connected to the Internet) to provide or process information are referred to herein as “internet-based services,” and human beings interacting with or otherwise using internet-based services are referred to herein as “users.”
Various internet-based services may relate to the physical world of users, including, for example, internet-search services (e.g., provided by search engines), social-networking services (e.g., provided by social networks), electronic-commerce services (e.g., provided by online retailers), publishing services (e.g., provided by online publishers), electronic mail services, and so on. One way in which internet-search services may relate to the physical world of users, for example, is that users may intend to interact with resources in the physical world relating to the results of internet search (e.g., a user may desire to visit restaurants that appear in the search results for an internet search directed to “restaurants”).
Some internet-based services provided with specific relevance to a geographic location can be said to be “targeted” on a particular geographic location (a “targeted geographic location”). Various attempts in the art have been made to identify a targeted geographic location that is the likely geographic location of a user. In some circumstances, providers of internet-based services can be informed of the geographic location of a user by receiving an unambiguous indication of the user's geographic location. For example, a subscriber to an internet-based service can create a profile for the internet-based service, which can specify the user's geographic location in various degrees of detail (e.g., time zone, country, state/province, county, city, postal code, dialing code, etc.). By way of further example, a subscriber to an internet-based service may create a profile indicating that the subscriber is in Palo Alto, Calif.; and the internet-based service provider deliver advertisements to the subscriber targeting the Palo Alto, Calif. market. Many providers of internet-based services, however, do not or cannot always receive such an unambiguous indication of the user's geographic location. As a result, internet-based services may be not targeted, or internet-based services may be mistakenly targeted.
So-called geolocation services are known to estimate or ascertain one or more geographic location of a computer device (e.g., a time zone, country, state/province, county, city, postal code, dialing code, etc.). So-called IP-geolocation services are known to do the same based on an internet address (e.g., an IP address) of the computing device. For example, a user accessing the internet from a computer on a university computer network in Palo Alto, Calif. may use an IP address relating to the geographic locations “Palo Alto” [city] or “94305” [postal code]; and search services targeted on either of those geographic locations may to yield search results related to (e.g., located in or near) the city of Palo Alto or, more particularly, the postal code 94305.
One particular disadvantage of IP-geolocation services is that internet addresses can relate to more than one geographic location, some of which may be geographically remote (e.g., San Francisco, Calif. and Los Angeles, Calif.) or geographically broad (e.g., California). Conventional geolocation services relating an internet address to more than one geographic location can provide confidence levels associated therewith. Accordingly, for any one internet address, IP-geolocation services may return a plurality of “candidate geographic locations,” and a confidence level for each, e.g., a plurality of candidate geographic location confidence levels or, simply, “candidate confidence levels.” In some examples of the prior art, candidate confidence levels can reflect probability values that a user (who is associated with an internet address) is physically located in or near a particular candidate geographic location. Further, in some examples of the prior art, a candidate confidence level for a particular candidate geographic location can reflect a relative probability that the user is physically located in or near the particular candidate geographic location, over all other candidate geographic locations of the plurality of candidate geographic locations. In certain examples in the prior art, internet-based services have been targeted on a candidate geographic location that is most likely (e.g., according to a relative probability) to be that which the user is located in or near (“probabilistic locality”).